Aaron Madrid, left, and John Fry, center, talk with a Lafayette Police Department bicycle officer during Bicycle Lafayette's Main Street Family Mash. / By Michael Dick/ISPhotographic

How to get involved

Bicycle Lafayette is branding itself with stickers designed to fit on a bike frame's tubing. / By Michael Dick/ISPhotographic

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Even as inaugural downtown festivals go, the Main Street Family Mash was modest. Thirty or so cyclists, many with young kids in tow, turned out for one of the first events sponsored by Bicycle Lafayette. Critical Mass, it wasn’t.

As cycling events go, the Main Street Family Mash was light on miles, satisfied to make it from the Margerum Fountain in West Lafayette, up to Main and 11th streets in Lafayette and back across the Myers Pedestrian Bridge. The 100 miles of the Wabash River Century, it wasn’t, either.

“It was only about five blocks,” said Aaron Madrid, one of the founders of the fledgling Bicycle Lafayette. “Serious cyclists might not have come because it sounded ridiculous. But they’re out for miles. Which is great. But we’re out for something different.”

The idea for Bicycle Lafayette had been kicked around for some time by Madrid, a marketing specialist for a company in Purdue Research Park, and fellow avid rider John Fry, an IT guy at Landis+Gyr.

They weren’t so much interested in organizing rides and events for people who already were cyclists. Madrid said they wanted to reach those who might not be comfortable with a traditional organized ride or those who have thought about commuting by bike but had never given it a shot.

And they wanted to show two sides of the same equation: how easy and how difficult it could be to get around Greater Lafayette on two wheels.

“We want to be advocates for cycling,” Madrid said.

“Everybody complains — why aren’t there more bike lanes, or why aren’t there more trails?” Fry said. “Everybody’d say, ‘Yeah, why is that? That’s not right.’ But no one was doing anything about it.”

So late this summer, they started talking up the Bicycle Lafayette concept with friends. In October, they tied in with the International Mountain Bicycling Association’s Take a Kid Mountain Biking Day for some family trail riding. And on Nov. 10, Bicycle Lafayette hosted the Main Street Family Mash. A week later, they held something called Cranksgiving, riding from downtown Lafayette to Food Finders Food Bank in southern Lafayette to deliver backpacks of canned food donations.

A funny thing happened on the way to doing something: City Hall checked in and seemed ready to at least listen right away.

Among the proposals: Monthly bike rides with the mayors. More bike lanes, particularly in the “hilltop to hilltop” areas of downtown Lafayette and the West Lafayette Village. A “bicycle benefits” program that offers discounts for cyclists at Greater Lafayette businesses. A commitment to get Greater Lafayette certified as a “Bicycle Friendly Community.”

The upshot in the report: A community cycling is a community alive.

“What Aaron and John want to do with Bicycle Lafayette fits perfectly,” said Margy Deverall, a planner in the Lafayette Economic Development Department. Deverall happens to be a big-mile cyclist who rode to a downtown interview on a Kona bike she bought to share at the office. (“I told everyone else they had to chip in on a decent lock,” she said.)

“You see something like ‘Good to Great,’ and you could say, ‘Here you go, City Hall, get it done,’ ” Deverall said. “Or you could go the Bicycle Lafayette way of getting it done. ... You have to have the grass-roots effort. If you don’t have that, you don’t have anything. I can’t tell you how excited I was about Bicycle Lafayette.”

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What “Good to Great” also called for were a lot of small efforts that added up to a bigger, more elusive vibe. Fry and Madrid’s willingness to tie Bicycle Lafayette to the Community of Choice concept likely will buy the group some entree with city officials and planners.

“We also want to help both West Lafayette and Lafayette take a close look at some of the infrastructure currently in place to make our cities cycling friendly,” Madrid said. “Just because we have 20 miles of paths doesn’t mean it is 20 miles worth of paths that mean anything to a commuter or a mountain biker. We love trails, but we need more than just a few fun paths. We need to make the roads safe, which comes from not only a change in infrastructure, but also a change in attitude on the parts of cyclists, drivers and even pedestrians.”

Greater Lafayette has at least offered some hope on that front. The Tippecanoe County Area Plan Commission’s latest transportation plan, approved this summer, includes a long list of specific bicycle- and pedestrian-oriented projects over the next five to 30 years. The plan calls for an additional 34.6 miles of bike lanes in Greater Lafayette. Many of those, planners contend, are “paint projects” — ones that simply would involve remarking existing streets and roads to include visible bike lanes.

“There’s so much that could be done that would be so easy,” Madrid said. “We’d love to be at the table when they’re thinking about this. We’d love to help.”

Once upon a time, about a dozen years ago, Lafayette qualified with the League of American Bicyclists’ Bicycle Friendly Community designation. That distinction evaporated a few years later. Since then, the standards have become tougher, Deverall said. She did a quick inventory of the League of American Bicyclists’ checklist of 17 suggestions — from miles of bike lanes to bike parking to a city’s safety features — for communities preparing to apply for bike-friendly status. The league suggests communities should think about applying once they can check nine items off the list. Deverall figured Greater Lafayette could check off five.

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There’s a long way to go. “We get that,” Fry said.

Madrid said Bicycle Lafayette will be about getting bikes to kids who want them and could use them. It will be about holding events that send a message that it’s OK to use a bike to get around Greater Lafayette. Eventually, he said, the idea is that Bicycle Lafayette will be about building toward cycling-centered, business-friendly events in the downtown along the lines of the Mass Ave. Criterium races in Indianapolis.

(Sound like a stretch? Remember, the monthly Mosey Down Main Street festivals started with two guys setting up in front of a couple of downtown shops five years ago. Look at it now.)

“Right now, there’s a lot of cycling,” Fry said. “There’s just no voice.”